The River of Fire!!

So!! For the Fourth of July, Mark and I were invited to have dinner with our friends the Petersons. They are REALLY nice people and they live right down the street from us. Sister petterson lives in the middle, and her two daughters live on either side of her house (they call it "the compound") :o) They are SO funny and so welcoming and all around fanTASTIC people. We sure love them. So! They had us over for dinner, and we brought out friend from work Elizabeth with us. They had a lot of people over, and the food was DELICIOUS. I really like any holiday that involves food and spending time with people that you love :o) Sadly, we had to leave early to go to the fireworks.

Mark LOVES fireworks. He told me that he thinks he has seen fireworks every year of his life expect for the two when he was in Ecuador. :o) I, on the other hand, and not to fond of them since I am kind of scared of explosive on fire things. But! We couldn't break Mark's little heart! So off we went to the "RIVER OF FIRE!".

We got their and waited for it to get dark:This is the two of us and our friend Elizabeth!

No one really knew where the fireworks were being shot from. Typically they were shot from the bridge, but this was the first year they were changing location. So, we re-parked the car closer and closer to the bridge in hopes that we would be able to be REALLY close to the fireworks :o) Marks likes to be able to feel the fireworks going off. Then you REALLY know you have been to a fireworks show.

...pretty sunset...
...not yet dark enough.......FIREWORKS!!! HOO-RAY!!!

It ended up that we didnt get close enough to the fireworks as Mark would have liked, and we could see another firework show across the river at the TRAC stadium that Mark thought was cooler, but we had a LOT of fun still! I sure like taking pictures of the fireworks!! I kept wanting Mark to look at the pictures of the fireworks...then I realized that its WAAAY better look at the REAL fireworks!!! :-D I like how when you take the pictures of the fireworks they make little explosion streamer lines :o)



Here are some more pictures of the fireworks for your viewing pleasure!:

Sunday Walks!

One of the things Mark and I especially like doing (when we have the time) is taking walks or bike rides on Sunday afternoons. This was especially nice in Richland as we had that fantastic bike trail right by our house :o)
There was lots of cool things to see. Plants, cool toys in the park, and always lots of people in the parks and on the water having lots of fun. There are LOT of fun things to do on a big beautiful river with boats and toys! People would be out with their dogs and throw sticks in the water and the dogs would go and get them. A few times we stayed and watched people play with their animals, I think it is so cool to watch dogs swim in the river. We would walk down to a park bench and sit on the bench swing together and talk. The first time we went there were LOTS of ducks on the shore, so after that we ( I) would bring bread on our walks to feed the ducks. I was REALLY excited about feeding the ducks and ESPECIALLY the geese since my sister The Goose is at home and I can't feed her ;o) But, alas, the geese and ducks were no longer out after that first adventure! We think it is becasue as the summer wore on, more and more people were out, and the birds got wise and stayed on their island. This didn't prevent me from faithfully bringing bread whenever we went and diligently look for ducks and geese. Sometimes we would see them waaaaaaaaay out in the water and I would yell real loud "HEY!! DUCKS!!! HEY WE HAVE BREAD!!!!" and then enlist mark to help me lob gobs of bread in their general direction (since he is a much better bread lobber than I am :o) But essentially...no...we did not get to feed any ducks:o( On one occasion we got pretty close to feeding some ducks. We found a little family of ducks in this stinky little side pond so I climbed down into the brush to get close and toss the bread to the ducks, but momma duck was REALLY good at being protective, and whenever I got close to throw it, she swam away...and she swam away ....and she swam away... :o(

*sniff sniff*

BUT! there is always next summer! :o) Mark is such a wonderful, patient man and he helped me try to feed the ducks EVERY time we went! :o) How thankful I am to be sealed to him, and how wonderful it is to be able to make such happy memories with the greatest guy in the whole world!!
We really liked the plants and the sun sets on the river :o) So pretty!!!

Anniversary Pie!!

Woo-HOO!! :-D

So! Mark and I were Married on December 21, 2007. For those of you good at calendar-ing, this means that our 6 month anniversary would land on?....(drum roll please)...ding! ding! ding! thats right! June 21st!

If you got that right, you are more astute than Mark and I (mostly the "I" part in Mark and I) :o) SO! yes, Mark and I forgot our 6th month anniversary...until we were sitting on the floor on Saturday night...at around 9pm...finalizing our talks for the next day...when we stumbled across our anniversary date as we were deciding who would be introducing us in their talk and saying how long we had been married :o) Mark pulled out his phone to settle the matter and see exactly how long we had been married and... oh! why look at that! we have been married 6 months TODAY! :-D

Ha ha, how funny! I guess that goes to show how low key Mark and I are. In retrospect, it WAS a really nice anniversary, even if we didn't KNOW it was our anniversary. We didn't have too many things to do that day and we got to spend a lot of time with one another, and we slept in, it was all around a wonderful day :o) How funny the way we remembered though!

Good thing Mark figured it out, I was WAAAY behind the times trying to convince him that no, 6th months from December is in JULY not JUNE silly Mark!...(it really is in June though, mark told me) ;o)

SO! to celebrate: The next day we had anniversary pie! :-D And since my husband is so wonderful and so nice and so stinkin' handsome...we had BLUEBERRY anniversary pie!!


Now THAT, is a delicious looking blueberry anniversary pie if I must say so myself.

It had an almond and cinnamon and brown sugar butter crumble-ly stuff on the top :o) mmmmm....nummy...
I liked it...
Mark liked it...

...all in all! it was some pretty good anniversary pie :o)

Bar-B-Que Time!!

So! Mark and I lived by a park in Washington. We thought this was pretty cool. Among other things, at the park, there were tables and chairs (something lacking in our house for the summer). So! On one of the first weekend we were there, we invited our neighbors to have a bbq with us at the park! :o) This was our grand solution for having people over for dinner, without having to ask them to sit on the floor. I was SO excited! I made potato salad, and pasta salad and we had pork chops that had been marinating and we had nectarines to cook on the grill for desert with a raspberry glaze! Unfortunately, our neighbors had to cancel...but it turned out to be for the best! You see...Mark and I are not very experienced coal barbecuer's:


We gleefully lit the flames...
...analyzed the flame properties...

..had a passerby take our picture... (said passerby was a really nice lady who stayed and talked with us for a long time too :o)...

...watched the moon rise higher and higher, while it got darker and darker...and all the people around us were getting up and leaving... most of which were armenian. They were having a giGANTIC armenian bash, which looked like lots of fun! Kids were everywhere, they were all playing, and they were speaking really really fast in their cool armenian ways...while we watched our meat sit there... Then the sprinklers came on...then people REALLY started to leave! :o) ..we didn't get wet, and yet SOMEHOW, all the excitement did NOT help our meat cook any faster...

...upon further analysis of the coals, we concluded that they just were not hot enough, and there just were not enough of them! The food was still raw, and we had been there forEVER! Granted, we had only put 20 coal under the meat (and by 'put 20 coals under the meat' i mean we 'painstakingly staked, accounting for proper ventilation, 20 coals to put under the meat' )... WHO KNEW that you needed lots of coal? OOPS!

Lesson learned: when you are stingy with the coals...the bbq is stingy with cookin the meat...
So! we finally decided to cut our losses and go home and cook the meat on the stove :o) GOOD THING WE DIDN'T HAVE GUESTS! THAT would have been REALLY funny :o) So, all in all, we had a lovely time at the park, I got kinnda grumpy (it happens when Im hungry, sadly) and we came home and cooked it on the stove and had a fabulous meal. We learned an important lesson about bbq heat distribution, and we now know to make sure there will be food before we invite people to eat it with us :o). AND not to eat near sprinklers.

OH! and i ALSO learned not to leave bacon on the stove while I go upstairs to wake up mark :o) Inevitably I will stay up there too long and the bacon will burn thusly:


I ALSO learned not to lift said burned bacon out of the pan with a plastic blue fork. You cant tell from this picture, but, as appetizing as this greasy bowl of half-burnt-half raw bacon looks...it looks TWICE as appetizing with little bits of blue plastic melted fork floating in it. Lets just say that one minute I was lifting the charcoaled bacon mass from the pan to more closely examine it and the next i was dodging the oozing, dripping mass of bacon and melting fork as it dripped back into the pan and sent hot grease popping everywhere. OOPS! Good thing I only cooked half the bacon. ;o) Mark and I had a good laugh about that. Ah! What culinary adventures we have! (please don't let this story deter you from accepting a dinner invitation with us)

Here are some more pictures of our first BBQ!!:

Fishing Endnotes

ISN'T MARK SO CUTE!?!

:o) As you can see, Marks love of fishing started at an early age :o) He especially loved to go fishing with his daddy and grandpa!

For those of you who asked, the fish he caught in washington were kokanee salmon. It is a lake variety of salmon :o)

ANYWAY, I wanted to share a 2 more stories about mark during girls camp:

Story 1: The sunday after I left, I walked mark through making a roast over the phone (there had been a full breifing before I left, but just in case, I was talking to him while he did it) so that he would have food when he came home from church, and left overs for the week. :o) He did a great job! But searing the meet was a liiiiiitle problematic...and lets just say our frying pan will never quite be the same :o) [Our Bishop asked mark to come over for dinner when he found out that he was by himself! That was really nice, and Mark really enjoyed getting to know them better and not having to be all alone on sunday afternoon!]

Story 2: Mark also went shopping while I was gone, and what did he buy?? Cereal and Ice cream :o) Surprise surprise!

I sure love my husband, and I was REALLY glad to come home. Girls camp was great (there was a tornado warning two nights, flooding, and the sirens were going off--a new experience for me) and my aunt Lauren was REALLY great in giving me a place to stay before and after camp and taking care of me :o) But more than anything, it was SO wonderful to be back with mark again after it was over! I debated putting a girlscamp post up... but decided against it since it essentially would be a small novel I am pretty sure. Girls camp is always such a special experience--for leaders and for girls. It is so wonderful to be in a place where you can have the spirit so strong all week and have a lot of fun without any distractions from the world. You really get to know people, and you have a lot of fun! I was with first year girls, and it was a really, really wonderful experience :o)

Fishies and Fishin'

2 weeks after we got to Washington, I flew back to Indiana to go to girls camp with the girls from our Branch. For those of you who don't know, Mark and I attend the 4th Branch of the Lafayette Stake of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. It is a Spanish branch, and we love it there (kinnda hard for me since I don't speak spanish very well, but that is ok, we are working on it!)

So! while I was off having lots and lots of fun with the girls in Indiana:o) Mark was left all alone by himself :o( Oh no, poor Mark!! But! Not to fear :o) Mark has some friends in our ward in Washington who looooove to fish. Since Mark loves to fish, this worked out great :o) This particular weekend they had a fishing excursion :o) The only problem was the weather wasn't cooperating, and it was freezing.

Here they are, all bundled up, in the middle of June on a boat in Washington. My handsome husband is on the bottom right :o)

They left at about 8 on Friday night, got to the lake about 10, fished all night until they caught their limit at around midnight, then fished the next morning until they caught their limit again, and then left to drive home and clean their catch. They used corn to catch the fish, chupe corn, and the fished loved it. :o) Mark said he was having problems at first because of his fishing line, so he only caught 17...but that is still a lot of fish!! Between the 4 of them, they caught 77 fish.

And there they be!! :o)

The fish were really, really yummy :o) We were invited to go over and have a fish fry with Jason and his family, it was really, really nice and a lot of fun. :o)
And there they are! The mighty fishermen!! :-D

Here are some more pictures of the fishing and the cleaning of the fish:

Painting!!

SO! This is the story of the house: Mark and I didn't know that we were going to be going to work at PNNL until, oh, a week or two before we needed to LEAVE and BE there. Yeah. This means that we had to find a place to live... on short notice... on the other side of the U.S. ... and we only wanted to be there for 3 months. In short: this was a veeeeeery tall order. So, we called, and called, and CALLED, apartments, people, real estate agents, Bishops in Washington, ANYONE to try to find a house. We decided though, that if we were supposed to go out there, Heavenly Father would help us find a house. So, we kept calling. The turning point came when we were at a kinkos ready to fax in a housing application for an apartment complex that we really didn't want to live in, that wouldn't be able to process our application in time for us to be there anyway. What happened was this: A lady called us back about renting her house, just before we faxed in the apartment application and told us her house she had rented to a guy in Texas...but she had looked in the newspaper for us for other peoples houses...AND she had called them to see if they would rent on short notice and only for three months...AND she had a list of three houses that would rent to us and their phone number if we wanted to call them. :o) WHAT an answer to our prayers! We called Patty (who became our land lady) and she said that she had a few houses that we could live in...if we could paint them :o) I was so desperate and relieved at this point I probably would have made a deal with Rumpelstiltskin so we said yes we would paint!

SO! This is the house we stayed in and painted!! :-D (and, in which we discovered that painting is not so fun...)

FIRST: we had to take off the awful wall paper.

Here is a close up in case you didn't believe that it was awful. The downstairs wall paper and the stairs came off pretty easy, but the up stairs paper was IMPOSSIBLE to take down. Eventually, Patty had to hire someone to take it off. And then to fix the wall underneath it, which had rotted :o( BLECK!! I guess thats what happens when you live in an old house!!
Amazingly enough, as awful as that wall paper was, it was a TOTAL improvement to the BRIGHT GREEN that it covered. Oh yes. YIKES!!! Form what we can tell, once the ENTIRE HOUSE was this green color. OH. MY. GOODNESS....I'm so glad we didn't live in it then. ;o)

Next, we primed the walls that had wall paper on them (the rest of the walls in the house were already white-ish)
here is a picture of mark edging the ceiling. He is SO nice. He edged the ceiling, and I filled in with a roller and edged the other corners with our super -nifty-edging-contraption-thing that made me an endging SUPER HERO!! :-D .Without the edging thing I doubt we could have gotten the house painted since I cant edge free hand like mark. It was the coolest! I think I have painting ADD. This, I have found, is not a very good technieqie for painting. I would paint a little here, then get boared of the view, then move to another wall...then another. I learned (very quickly) that this is not so good, and makes it look...yucky :o( We needed to put 2 coats on everything anyway though, and Mark showed me how to do it nice and even, so it looked real nice when we were done. (we dont have any pictures of if being done. We finished the night before we had to leave...and then we still had to pack... uh oh!!) :o)
I also really like writing notes to my husband :o)
...and drawing him pictures...
Here I am sporting the lovely paint mask since paint fumes make me REALLY sick, and then i am no fun to be around :o( So! the mask helps a lot!!
So! We had to paint. A lot. Actually...thats all we ever did :o) Pretty much. Work and Paint :o) We painted the first weekend we were in town...and like I said, we were still painting the night before we left. :o) OH NO!!! We had ANGELES who came and help us though, the Greer-Short family. They came and helped us paint, and then the night before we left Sis. Greer Short came AGAIN and stayed a long time and helped us paint some more, and clean...and pack. What a WONDERFUL family, and I will tell you about them more I promise. But for now, the bottom line is, there was a lot of painting this summer, and this is what it looked like :o)

Here are some more painting pictures!!

"Can you tell me how you get, how you get to...."

...Sibert Street!! :o) Our place of residence for the summer!
This is the house that Mark and I rented :o) We lived on the left side of an "A" house that was built 'round-about the 1940's. (let me explain the terminology)

Richland Washington sprang up around in the 1940's because of the Hanford site located to the North of Richland. "Hanford" is the site of B Reactor (among others), the first large scale nuclear reactor that was built for the production of the plutonium used in the Trinity device and Fat Man and (I think also) Little Boy in WWII. The town of Hanford, originally a farming community founded in 1907, was chosen as the build site because of three main reasons: 1. it was isolated, 2. it had an existing railroad spur, and 3. its located on the banks of the Columbia river (...that is an over simplification, but thats ok). Building Hanford was INCREDIBLY labor intensive, and at the peak of construction in 1944 the construction camp housed over 50,000 people!! Anyway, I could talk a LOT about Hanford [especially the cool reactors they have there that they are cocooning, (I even go to walk through B reactor and sit in Enrico Fermi's chair! I think my IQ raised from sitting there, I am pretty sure...) ] But I wont here. Maybe I will tell you later. :o) The BOTTOM LINE is, is that there was a LOT of people transplanted to the area to work on building and then maintaining the reactors--but, understandably, the government did not want workers living ON the construction site long term (for obvious reasons)--so permanent housing was built to the south in Richland.

Richland was also a small farming town at that time of around 400 people. BUT!! (here is the story part) by 1945, it had been TRANSFORMED into being able to hold 17,500 people!!! OH MY GOODNESS THATS A LOT OF HOUSES ! The houses that were built were "alphabet houses" meaning there were 5 or 6 floor plans used (A, B, C, F, G, etc.)...over, and over, and OVER enough times to house 17,500 people :o) Now there are more houses in Richland, and the Tri-Cities is a really nice place to live. There is a Large LDS community there, and the Columbia River Temple (SO PRETTY!!) and we really really really love it there :o)

So! we lived in an "A" house--which is Richlanderish for a two story duplex house with a basement. :o)

In the paper people will list only: " 'A' house for Sale", and you will have a pretty good idea of what the house will be. :o) Saves on add costs I guess!

Here is a view of our street from one way...


...and from the other other!!
If you walk down the street in the first picture...then through the park...and cross another street...you will be at the church!! We LOVED walking to church, it was really nice :o)

If you walk down the street in the second picture...you run into the river!!! :-D That hill looking thing is a raised bank that has the bike trail on it. THAT is the bike trail that we took to work! :o) It goes right up to the lab :o) and it is SO PRETTY!! The Columbia River is, I think, the PRETTIEST river in the world. Since it is Glacier melt water, it is really blue--and REALLY cold. :o) Not all muddy like other rivers that will remain nameless at this time... ;-)

Here is a picture of us in the park by the river (that is part of the bike path behind us, and you can see some of the river).

here is a picture of us on the trail going for a walk
here is a sun set on the river...

...and here is another sun set. Man did we like that river! Richland is a great place to live and it seems like a wonderful place to raise a family :o). Our neihbor, Doug Strong, was the Parks and Recreation director for Richland. He and his wife were really nice people :o) We got to hear a lot about parks and recreation stuff that I never knew about. People in Richland are proud of their history (for the most part) and proud of their community. They have a lot of really nice parks by the river, and people are ALWAYS in them :o) A lot of the things that people do revolve around the river :o) I wish we would have taken more pictures so you guys would know more about what a lovely place Richland was. Sorry! (Now we know for next time!)

Anyway! This is where we lived for the summer, AND (here is my final plug) if any of you are looking for a place to move to and you would like to work at a DOE lab-- THIS is the BEST one to work at :o) (no offense Los Alamos and Sandia...but hands down that is true) . What a wonderful place to have spent the summer!

Washington or Bust!

So! Mark and I spent our summer '08 in Richland Washington on internships. We packed up our house, packed the car, and said goodbye to Lafayette as we headed to Mark's Parents house. :o)

(yes, this is kinnda embarrassing that there is a box of tampons right in this picture, but this demonstrates why Mark likes to drive so much. He doesn't understand how I can have all these things down by my feet :o) so every time that we would switch driving, he would clean out the bottom feet place, which I REALLY appreciated...and then I would manage to mess it up again before we would switch back! I have decided though, that its not necessarily my fault that things always get messy when I am near them... who am I to withstand that inevitable force of entropy?? See? Not my fault! Law of nature... ;o) )Here we are at Mark's Parents house!! We got to stay there for a bit and visit. It was really nice to see them:o) We tried to get up one morning to drive becky to school..but we were waaay to tired. :o( I don't think I have ever seen mark so delirious, but then again, I don't wake him up very much. Come to think of it, i don't EVER think I have woken mark up, its ALWAYS the other way around! Waking people up=no fun i have decided. :o) Anyway, we were really, REALLY tired from packing (mostly mark since he carried all the heavy stuff, poor-poor mark!) but we DID manage to tell her that we loved her before she went to seminary :o) Mark's dad gave him a really nice blessing that helped us to be brave leaving IN for the summer :-D


And thar she be! The open road!

We drove, and drove, and drove. And drove. Our plan was to drive straight through the night and switch drivers. This was frustrated by the fact that we never REALLY decided we were doing that or not...so I felt bad for sleeping while mark was driving...so when it came around to be MY turn to drive...i was REEEEEEALLY tired. Oops! We ended up stopping for 3 hours at 1:00 in the morning at a truck some place between here and Salt Lake for a little pit stop, and then we got back to driving till we got to Salt Lake!

We stayed one day with Marks Aunt and family and saw Michael and Lindsey (and witnessed when she told the family that she was going to have a baby), and then we stayed another day with Auntie Shaun and their family and got to see the twins and it was really nice to see them. By really nice i mean WONDERFUL!!!! :-D We also found out that Aunt Shaun was coming up to the Richland area, and that we would be able to see her and everyone AGAIN before the summer was over! WHO-RAY!!


Another pit stop. Mark had never been to Sonic before. (Or i think only once, in NM). While we were there, I thought we were going to be eaten alive by the seagulls. I was throwing them crackers out the window and they were swarming the car. :-) Pretty much, i rolled down the window a crack, tossed the goods, and then rolled up the window and yelled "Run away Mark! Run away!!" :o) It was pretty fun.

Here we are getting car crazy! I don't know if you can get cabin fever or not...but look! Mark let his beard grow the WHOLE TIME we were driving across!! Let me explain why this is such a big deal: I love marks beard. Every vacation, he lets it grow for me :o) then, when we have to go to school, or work, or the temple, ....pretty much the real world... he shaves it off again :o) This means that whenever we get to see Marks parents, or the people where he grew up, we are on vacation, and he lets his beard grow, and his family always gives him grief about it. :o) They think he looks scraggly. I think he looks like a leprechaun.
Here is us on the top of a "mountain" in Oregon, pointing towards the Washington boarder :o) We are a few hours away!!
The Washington state line!! ...22 miles to go....
Tri-Cities!! We made it!!!

It is important to note here that Mark got us across the United Stated of America without any problems. My job was to get us from Kennewick, to Richland (about 10 miles away from one another). I failed. :o) We got lost. :o) Well, not LOST lost, we just took the way that I took on my bike ... which is not, necessarily, the best for a car ... lets say :o) So, it took us a while to get there, and I kept saying things like "No! no wait... ok, this is good, this is good, i remember that building, yeah...yeah! and this stop light looks familiar...ok, yeah! we're good. go straight."

And what did we do our first night in Richland? Got taco bell :o) We went through the drive through, took our food to the bank of the Columbia River, and ate it right at sun set (that was a coincidence, but it sure was nice :o) We waited to meet Patty (our land lord) and she showed us the house.

In essence: Mark and I had a lot of fun driving across the U.S. and we were ready to stay in one place for a while.

Here are some more pictures for your enjoyment of our adventures, in case you wanted to see more scenery we passed through: